Robert Tappan Morris, (born November 8, 1965), is an American computer scientist, best known for creating the Morris Worm in 1988, considered the first computer worm on the Internet - and subsequently becoming the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
He went on to co-found the online store Viaweb, one of the first web-based applications, and later the funding firm Y Combinator - both with Paul Graham. He is a tenured professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His father was the late Robert Morris, a coauthor of UNIX and the former chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center, a division of the National Security Agency (NSA).
